You see, this shrieking TV woman began by saying that she is not a doctor or medical professional of any kind, which already had me skeptical about whatever she was going to shout next. But then she delivered her position on why parents shouldn’t vaccinate their children in a much louder voice than my doctor, and it put some serious doubts in my mind. Would someone less sure of herself be able to be quite so loud? It seems unlikely.

Well ya see, Norm, it’s like this... A herd of buffalo can only move as fast as the slowest buffalo. And when the herd is hunted, it is the slowest and weakest ones at the back that are killed first. This natural selection is good for the herd as a whole, because the general speed and health of the whole group keeps improving by the regular killing of the weakest members. In much the same way, the human brain can only operate as fast as the slowest brain cells. Excessive intake of alcohol, as we know, kills brain cells. But naturally it attacks the slowest and weakest brain cells first. In this way, regular consumption of beer eliminates the weaker brain cells, making the brain a faster and more efficient machine. That’s why you always feel smarter after a few beers.

Mulder: He just wants some dating advice. Scully: From whom? Mulder: Yours truly. (long silence) Hello? Scully? You there? Scully: Mulder, when was the last time you went on a date? Mulder: I will talk to you later. (hangs up)

To the left of the fireplace, a chiaroscuro Neapolitan painting by Viola. 'Typical of early eighteenth-century South German painting,' boomed the journalist Joe Alsop. As Joe was an expert on everything, he was generally wrong on everything, particularly on his subject, politics. For thirty years we were losing to Communism, according to Joe.

There's a kind of notion that everyone's opinion is equally valid. My arse! A bloke who's been a professor of dentistry for 40 years doesn't have a debate with some idiot who removes his teeth with string and a door!

—Dara Ó Briain, "Respectful Insolence"

He's got a bunch of fucking dancing bears parading around in the ring, a bunch of women with silicone, and a bunch of club-footed, slap-happy fucking guys that couldn't work their way out of a wet paper bag. And he don't know the fucking difference. And he's out there beating up Ric Flair with a baseball bat...He made this statement: 'Well, we'll just teach actors to wrestle, because if I can learn to work in the ring, anyone can!' There's a goddamn news bulletin I didn't hear about when I heard about World War II and all the other great happenings of the past fifty years!: When did Vince Russo learn to fucking work?

When I say that you shouldn’t opine on monetary policy unless you’re willing to invest some time on understanding the monetary debate, I am saying exactly that. I’m not saying that you need a Ph.D. or a chair at a fancy university; I’m saying that you need to do your homework.

In a better world, none of this would be relevant. Policy disputes would be based on defensible, well-informed positions, on which reasonable people could disagree, and people who were proved wrong would acknowledge that fact and revise their views. Also, everyone would get a pony.

'Trump University' is proof that you can't make words explode, no matter how violently you combine opposites. Donald Trump can lose money in a casino when he owns it. He doesn't learn from his mistakes, he bankrupts or sues them, and the only thing he can teach people is that they shouldn't have given him their money, a lesson his educational dialysis facility taught well. It called itself "Trump University" despite a total lack of accreditation. A strip club could claim they were teaching anatomy with exactly the same legitimacy. It was legally forced to change its name by the New York State Department of Education, which stated, 'Use of the word 'university' by your corporation is misleading and violates New York Education Law.' Even in New York, a city of shining spires to every kind of financial bullshit imaginable, it is illegal for Trump to claim that he can teach you anything.

If you've been wondering why Slate has been so terrible recently, so Upworthy and Buzzfeedy, it's a good bet the cause is the smothering presence of neoliberal turd Matt Yglesias. A twitterati with no degree in economics, he regularly suggests the answer might be somewhere in the middle and gives a thorough tongue bath to big business...Robots are just time savers like the cotton gin, so why be afraid of progress? I don't know, Matt, maybe because the cotton gin helped the spread of human slavery and it couldn't even fly around and shoot missiles at people. Presumably he later forgot he wrote this idiocy when he was lathering Amazon about their drones creating a new paradigm.

Tsoukalos graduated from Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York in 1998 with a degree in communication and sports information. That makes him uniquely qualified to speak on matters concerning the movie Jerry Maguire, but not so much regarding anything else.

If I were to create a list of questions to ask potential managers of my money, one of them would be: 'Do you read the WSJ Op-Eds?' If the answer were yes, I would not walk but run in the opposite direction.

—Barry Ritholtz

That’s right, AirAsia! If you have simply read every Gregggggg op-ed ever written, that plane would have landed safely! Instead, like the rest of the IMMATURE GLORY BOYS out there, you chose to ignore your fair columnist, and now the plane is missing. O WOE UNTO THOSE WHO WOULD DEFY THE PLANE GODS.

Anyway, Gregggggg is back from vacation this week (he spent his entire vacation in church, praying to God for people to listen to his prophecies), and he’s still spewing out liquid dogshit...WHY DON’T YOU BREAK YOUR ARM A LITTLE MORE PATTING YOURSELF ON THE PENIS.

It seems like Gene Simmons, aka The Demon from Kiss, aka an old fart that has been lingering in the air since 1982 has realized that after his lengthy career as a rock god and a much shorter career as a reality TV star, he is edging closer to cultural irrelevancy. So, the man wrote a book, and boy, he's got some tough love for those freeloading have-it-alls he likes to refer to as 'women.'...Imagine that. A man famous boasting that he's slept with thousands of women and for the saying, 'if you want to welcome me with open arms, I'm afraid you're also going to have to welcome me with open legs' knows what's best for you ladies.

It takes both chutzpah and a complete lack of intellectual scruples to be able to make two arguments that are so diametrically opposed to each other in such a short period...I don’t understand why, say, Jon Stewart, has helped this hack along by inviting her onto his show as a purported expert on the Depression. You really shouldn’t trust a word that she says or writes before verifying it with three or four independent sources.

International Black Ops spy stories tend to come up in a lot of 'imaginative' people's backstories, as it's CIA policy to never publicly comment on such matters, to confirm or deny. Just watch how they'll fail to acknowledge the time I rescued Shannon from LOST from a group of space-terrorists and decapitated a genocidal Third World dictator with a single karate chop. See? Not a peep.

Having equal rights does not mean having equal talents, equal abilities, or equal knowledge. It assuredly does not mean that 'everyone’s opinion about anything is as good as anyone else’s.' And yet, this is now enshrined as the credo of a fair number of people despite being obvious nonsense... To take but one horrifying example, we live today in an advanced post-industrial country that is now fighting a resurgence of whooping cough — a scourge nearly eliminated a century ago — merely because otherwise intelligent people have been second-guessing their doctors and refusing to vaccinate their kids after reading stuff written by people who know exactly zip about medicine. (Yes, I mean people like Jenny McCarthy.)

Sherri confirmed to Deadline that The View has lost its resident science expert. A source (aka Sherri) tells UsWeekly that the producers were trying to get Sherri to stay, but they couldn’t come to an agreement about money. Yeah, Sherri probably wanted 1 trillion dollars and ABC wanted to pay her a half-penny a day since that’s what her thoughts are worth.

Jenny hasn’t shat up a statement yet, but I’m sure she’ll say that it was her decision to leave The View...she wants to devote more time to her real passion: bringing up the number on JennyMcCarthyBodyCount.com by telling everyone to stay away from vaccines.

In other words, screw you. I got mine, and I don’t care about anyone else and am perfectly satisfied to sponge off of herd immunity. Even worse, he’s blaming cancer on vaccinations without a shred of evidence to support his viewpoint. That this man is an actual cardiologist is a profound embarrassment to the specialty of cardiology. No, it’s a profound embarrassment to all physicians. I am profoundly embarrassed that such an pathetic excuse for a human being is a fully board-certified member of my profession...He is full of the arrogance of ignorance and practically breaks his arm patting himself on the back for being so smart when his scientific ignorance is beyond epic. Indeed, he even seems to think that you can eliminate stupid things you’ve posted on the Internet by just deleting the post in which you said them.

And did I say again that this is the sort of idiot that CNN features on its news reports about the ongoing measles outbreak?

—Orac, "Antivaccine cardiologist Jack Wolfson and the resurrection of false balance about vaccines…again!"

Jonah Goldberg legitimately fascinates me...he’s a protected mama’s boy and fancies himself a gen-yoo-ine scholar who thinks really deep thoughts and occasionally like whole dozens of words on his own and like opens a book or two and really wants to be accepted as the super-smart academifyness that he thinks that makes him.

Chakotay’s spirituality doesn’t feel fully-formed or deeply personal. Instead, it seems more like a party trick he uses to casually entertain colleagues... the show’s creators worked with an 'expert' in Native American culture and heritage to help ground Chakotay as a character. Unfortunately, that expert was Jamake Highwater, a controversial figure with a shady history whose claims to be Native American have been challenged since the 1980s. So, somewhat sadly, this is the shape of things yet to come.

Jeffrey Lyons is the most reliable movie critic in the world…if you do the opposite of everything he says. He is a man so impressively wrong that you would do well to stay as far away from his advice as you can.

This is Final Fantasy VIII's only optional dungeon, and it has the potential to be a doozy. Don't listen to a single goddamn word Zell says unless you feel like spending three hours instead of three minutes getting to the bottom. This is something I had to learn the hard way.

Late in 1988, a former soldier of fortune and treasure hunter named Randy Widner invited Seagal, Goldman and another man to hunt for treasure off the coast of Barbados. At that time, Seagal had been telling Goldman that he’d been a U.S. Navy SEAL. Evidently this was one frogman who did not take well to water... 'The surf was unbelievable, really tough… He started screaming and panicking and was sure he was going to die and all that crap... Wildner had to pull Seagal by his hair.'

Cooper: Gamers are seeing women as these objects of desire, as these hot bodies. They don't show women as being valued as anything other than their sexuality, and it's a man choosing how many women he wants to sleep with.

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